The economic relations of author, publisher, bookseller, and reader and artist, dealer, and patron

James Hamilton

The following passage comes from the author's A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain, which is reviewed on this site. — George P. Landow

he connections between author, publisher, bookseller and reader form
perhaps one of the simplest, even most primitive, economic chains of
events that carry a produer to its user. There are no primary essential
external requirements here, such as land and fertilizer, factory and engine,
coal and heat, disease and treatment, whose failure (or in the case of
disease, presence) would damage the process of bringing the product to
the consumer. It is a straightforward commercial transaction in which
the author provides the words, the publisher makes the book or journal
and sells it on to the bookseller, and the reader hands over the money to
buy the product. Of course, a publisher requires a printing machine, but
not any one machine in particular. A wet summer might damage crops,
increase the price of a loaf and lead to social unrest, bur it will not have a
direct effect on book prices. An author might suffer from consumption,
as did Maria Callcott [and John Keats], but his or her absence from the scene would make
no noticeable difference to the overall picture; there will always be another
author, and books still sell posthumously. Authors, publishers and booksellers do not need casts of thousands. Much the same can be said about
the link between artist, dealer and patron, in which there is rarely any true
rationale in the pricing structure, except comparison. The process is an
organism of minimal complexity, and the transaction may be essentially
bluff or barter. [247/248]